ALOYSIUSI LIONEL POLINTAN Reviews
LIFEBOAT by
Kristine Ong Muslim
(University of Santo Tomas Publishing House, Manila,
2015)
POETRY AS
RESCUE, RESCUE AS POETRY
"Art
is repulsion floating in a bowl of soup. Sometimes it is,
the
soup."
That poetry - with its
rhyme, rhythm, and meter - places itself as the summa theologiae of Howard
Gardner's verbal-linguistic intelligence as attested by Kristine Ong Muslim's LIFEBOAT (USTPH, 2015). From the title,
one might guess that this compiles verses adoring bodies of water or testifying
truths behind mermaids and underwater empires. This tome, needless to say,
delves into man's concupiscence - his guilty pleasures, his aversions of gaze
on what lurks in peripheral vision, and his questions he's ever-hesitant to ask
the world. These aspects of "inclinations to stumble" are articulated
in the ether, a celestial firmament reflecting its light back to the river's
translucent pavement. This ether where Muslim flaps her wings and strikes wind
to seagulls.
Her deliberate, dramatic
use of anaphora does not overshadow her enviable ability to alchemize poems
into cadences of sorrow and longing. And this technique is fused, with all
precision, with imagery which vitalizes speculative fiction's enticements. As
one of the poems says, "Everyone will / learn to paddle towards
nonexistent shores. Everyone will / follow the Ferryman's trail as he searches
for the submerged / continent."
Muslim is a poet of
promise, that is to say, empowering people to believe in a promise held unto
them. Her poetry serves as resonance of a promise meant to be fulfilled or a
privilege speech crafted to inspire people to continue with their causes. The
future is just loitering behind ivory-made icons enveloped in dust-stricken
robes. In "City of Rivers", the speaker invites us "landlocked
savages" to enter a future of nothing but riverbanks to "gurgle our
prayers from now / on, calling out to the god of rivers." She then
proceeded with "The One Called Sunday" exhorting "we will bury
the dead so that we do not / disturb the living with each thud of spade against
/ overturned earth." Poems like these for sure will haunt us, as these
offer us glimpses to worlds we might not be able to inhabit or villages that
can hold us captive.
Everything is in its
right place, in its light weight in spite of the heaviness of emotion it
intends to create. Just like the lifeboat, Muslim rescues words from being led
astray by incapacitated wordsmiths and verses from falling into oblivion by
unguarded minstrels.
Causing worms to produce
wings, showing a young woman with an empty palm, staring at a storyteller
feeding birds "handfuls of nonexistent breadcrumbs", this
internationally published poet continues to write down not only her
observations of world's cruelty or oceans' serenity, but also, more importantly,
the possibilities of conquest, reminding us that "we exist, that we /
wait, that we break lifetimes against / our backs as if we still have
time."
*****
Aloysiusi Lionel Polintan is a Senior High School
Coordinator of Divina Pastora College in Gapan City, Nueva Ecija. He loves
reading and writing poetry, and everything that ranges from Bob Dylan to
Hozier, and from Mahalia Jackson to Christina Aguilera. He is doing research on
intangible cultural heritage of Southern Novo Ecijanos. He maintains a
blog: /react-text http://renaissanceofanotebook.blogspot.com
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